For Duna Rolando, the longing for the homeland means above all a longing for a lost paradise. A paradise that has been created in the distance by our own memory and which doesn’t correspond in most cases to a reality based on selective remembrance of our experiences and feelings of the past.

Duna Rolando was born in Argentina and lives since 1990 in Germany. She is herself a descendant of an emigrant’s family. Her ancestors were Germans, Italians and Spaniards. The unfulfilled desires of her family to return to their own homeland formed the mould of her childhood and thus of all her future experiences: mainly that she would be, as well, living abroad, as she has done since 1988. The work „Portraits of Longing“ is a continuous process. It consists of the sum of portraits of the people who live in Berlin and have a migrant background. The series of painted individual portraits leads, time after time, to the creation of a kind of a tiled structure that reflects a part of Berlins society.

„It is the longing that feeds our soul and not the fulfilment. And the meaning of our life is the path and not the goal. For every answer is delusive, every fulfilment dissolves in our hands, and the goal is no more, as soon as it is achieved.“ Arthur Schnitzler (in 1862-1931, Austrian dramatist and narrator